Top 10 Cloud Stories Of 2010

Everybody's head was in the cloud, or so it seemed in 2010. Both well established and startup vendors developed solutions and strategies designed to extend their reach or provide entry into this booming market. After all, IDC estimated the cloud market will be worth $55 billion by 2014; Gartner predicted the cloud world could be valued at $148 billion at that time, in part because Gartner included Google AdWords advertising revenue in its figures, said Gregor Petri, adviser, lean IT and cloud co

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Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels gets a lot of credit for EC2, and he has been a relentless proselytizer for the service. But the people behind the scenes were Chris Pinkham and teammates, who architected the original Amazon store services, then realized the same computing engine could be offered as a general purpose service. Pinkham wrote Amazon Web Services EC2, and then left to work from his homeland, South Africa. Now he's back in the United States and started Nimbula with co-founder Willem van Bijon, aiming to provide the software to build an Amazon-like infrastructure inside the enterprise. Nimbula's first product, cloud operating system Director, launched as a beta product on Aug. 30.

To learn more about what organizations are doing to tackle attacks and threats we surveyed a group of 300 IT and infosec professionals to find out what their biggest IT security challenges are and what they're doing to defend against today's threats. Download the report to see what they're saying.

Chances are your organization is adopting cloud computing in one way or another -- or in multiple ways. Understanding the skills you need and how cloud affects IT operations and networking will help you adapt.